Felder, Richard, "We Never Said It Would Be Easy."
Chem. Engr. Education, 29(1), 32-33 (Winter 1995).
Richard M. Felder
Department of Chemical Engineering
North Carolina State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-7905
OK, here's the scenario. You go to a teaching workshop presented
by Woods or Wales or Stice or Smith or that joker from North Carolina
who's always ranting about this stuff. The presenter instructs
you to immerse your students in real-world problems without routinely
providing all the requisite facts and formulas. He also tells
you-repeatedly-to stop doing so much lecturing and instead get
the students to work in teams and teach each other. Once they
realize they can no longer count on you to tell them all they
need to know, they'll start to rely on themselves to figure it
out-which is to say, they will learn to learn.
You may be in for a rude shock. It's not that the methods don't
work-they do. I've had great success with some of them, particularly
cooperative learning, and I do my fair share of missionary work
on their behalf. The success is neither immediate nor automatic,
however, and the awkwardness and frustration and student resistance
and hostility you may experience before you get to the payoff
can be formidable. It's tempting to give up in the face of all
that, and many instructors unfortunately do.
The problem is that doing anything new and nontrivial always
involves a learning curve, and the curve may be particularly steep
for both you and your students when you try an active learning
approach for the first time. The students, whose teachers have
been telling them everything they needed to know from the first
grade on, don't appreciate having this support suddenly withdrawn,
and complaints like "Meachley never teaches us anything-we
have to do it all ourselves" start echoing through the corridors.
It's even worse if you use cooperative (team-based) learning:
students then gripe loudly and bitterly about other team members
not pulling their weight or about being slowed down by having
to explain everything to that lemon they've been forced to team
with. Sometimes instructors who are effective lecturers get lower
student ratings when they start using active and cooperative learning
My goal here is to assure you that these initial glitches are
both common and natural, and that they may be a cause for concern
but not for panic or discouragement. The trick is knowing how
the process works, taking a few precautionary steps to smooth
out the bumps, and waiting out the inevitable setbacks until the
payoffs start emerging.
Consider the students. Woods observes that students
forced to take major responsibility for their own learning go
through some or all of the steps psychologists associate with
trauma and grief:
Just as some people have an easier time than others in getting
through the grieving process, some students may enthusiastically
dive right into active learning and short-circuit many of the
eight steps, while others may have difficulty getting past the
negativity of Step 3. The point is to remember that the resistance
you encounter from some students is a natural part of their journey
from dependence to intellectual autonomy, and if you provide
some help along the way, sooner or later most of them will make
So what can you do to help them and yourself get through the
process? Out of painful necessity(1) I've developed an
arsenal of strategies. For whatever they may be worth, here they
Set the stage. When I plan to use active or cooperative
learning in a course, I explain on Day 1 exactly what I'm going
to do and why. I assure the class, for example, that I'll be
making them work in class not to make my life easier (quite the
contrary), but because research shows that students learn by doing,
not by just watching and listening. I reinforce the point by
citing some of the research; as always, McKeachie
and Wankat and Oreovicz provide good general summaries
and Johnson et al. cite results specifically
for cooperative learning.
Provide coaching on the skills you want the students to develop.
When students complain (or make evident in other ways) that they
don't know how to set up problem solutions or prepare for tests
or work effectively in teams, I try to offer some guidance during
my office hours and occasionally hold a miniclinic in class.
Woods, Wankat and Oreovicz, and Johnson
et al. are rich sources of methods for facilitating development
of learning and teamwork skills.
Get feedback and try to be responsive to it. Especially
when many students in a class seem to be spending a great deal
of their time hovering around Stages 3 and 4 of the trauma scale
(loss of confidence, anger, and withdrawal), I grit my teeth and
conduct a midsemester evaluation, asking them to list things they
like about the class, things they dislike, and things that would
improve the class for them. The first list often surprises me:
the complaints I've been hearing tend to monopolize my attention,
clouding my awareness that what I'm doing is working well for
many or most of the students. The things they dislike are not
exactly fun to read, but I learn from them and the students seem
to appreciate the opportunity to vent. The suggested improvements
may include some that are unacceptable to me ( "Stop assigning
problems that you haven't lectured on." "Cut
out this group garbage.") but I may be able to act on
others without seriously disrupting my plans or compromising my
principles. When I respond positively to some of their suggestions
(like easing off on the length of the homework assignments, or
giving them the option of doing a few assignments individually),
it usually goes a long way toward getting them to meet me halfway.
Be patient. I expect many of my students (especially those
I haven't previously taught) to be frustrated and upset in the
first few weeks of my courses. I deal with it now better than
I used to, knowing from experience that most of them will turn
around by the final exam.
Go back to the references periodically. When some of my
cooperative learning groups seem to be disintegrating halfway
through the semester, I look back at one of Karl Smith's monographs
(or, for that matter, at my own workshop notes). I'm usually
reminded that I've been neglecting one or another of the recommended
CL practices, like having the groups regularly assess their functioning
and work out what they need to do differently in the future.
Don't expect to win them all. In the end, despite my best
efforts, some students fail and some who pass continue to resent
my putting so much of the burden of their learning on their shoulders.
A student once wrote in a course-end evaluation, "Felder
really makes us think!" It was on the list of things
he disliked. On the other hand, for all their complaints about
how hard I am on them, my students on the average earn higher
grades than they ever did when I just lectured, and many more
of them now tell me that after getting through one of my courses
they feel confident that they can do anything. So I lose some,
but I win a lot more. I can cheerfully live with the tradeoff.
1. Believe me, my observations about student resistance are neither theoretical nor speculative.
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